I'm tired of using The Real Books in conventional ink on paper form. Others I play with access these tunes on their Ipads. Am I able to use Ipad generation 1 with minimal memory (16Gb) to display these charts? Would I be able to use drop box to transfer .pdf files from my laptop to the Ipad? thanks in advance for your good advice.
IIRC forScore support (one of main programs, happens to be the only reason I own an iPad) is limited for the iPad1 - the iPad2 is still actively supported, though (again, IIRC) That's what their website says today. There are other programs. forScore does integrate with dropbox and other cloud services easily. If not storing much else on it, 16 Gb should be fine, unless you have really bloated PDFs (sizes can vary depending on how they are produced and on what equipment with what settings if they are from scans rather than digital documents) and quite a few of those. 16 Gb is a LOT of space when talking documents, not videos.
You might find this thread helpful. WE Warrior needs tablet computer as a teleprompter. Also, you can generally use a USB cable to transfer PDFs directly (as an alternative to dropbox/cloud approaches - can be faster if you have a large number to move.)